Part III The Landscape
Rev. W. T. Allison
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
There is little landscape description either in Homer or in the Psalter. Little pictures are not uncommon in ancient poetry, but the rush of the story was too impetuous, or the stress of human feeling too violent, for any dallying on the way to paint natural scenery for its own sake. Homer is lured on by "the bright eyes of danger;" the Psalmist poets pay little attention to the objective world. The landscape where the hero performs his feats, or where Diana engages in the chase, is understood to be beautiful, and the colors used by the poet are put on with a sparing hand. To the epic or to the psalm there is scarcely any background whatever; the Homeric poems and the Psalms are alike in their subjection of natural beauty to humanity and movement. The poet cannot bear to take his eyes from the human or divine actor for long; if he does linger for a moment to describe a pleasant scene, it is merely for purposes of illustration, or because the view elicits his admiration because of its fruitfulness, or his hate because of its repellent features. In both Greek and Hebrew poetry Nature is described in her large, actual, true aspect, with small talk of beauty and much emphasis of the useful; either a large brush is used by the painter, or a thumb-nail sketch is effected.
Ruskin has described Homer's
method of treating landscape,1
and the Grecian habit of subserving all the beauty of
earth to the human comfort—to
the foot, the taste, or the
smell; the plain grass, fruit,
or flower is referred to in
matter-of-fact language. The
ideal landscape to the Greek was
subservient to human service; it
was ideal precisely because it
offered good pasturage, fruitful
soil, or pleasant shade. Every
ideal landscape, Ruskin points
out, is composed of a
fountain, a meadow, and a shady
grove. Mercury halts on his swift message to behold
with gladness a landscape
consisting of a cave covered
with a running vine,
grape-laden, and surrounded by a
grove of alder, poplar, and
sweet-smelling cypress. In an
orderly row are four fountains
of white water running through a
moist meadow full of violets and
parsley. Calypso sings beside
her fire of finely chopped cedar
wood, which exhales a smoke as
of incense through the island,
and owls, hawks, and
"long-tongued sea-crows" roost
in the branches of the trees.2
In the Odyssey the garden of Alcinous further emphasizes, and
with more prosaic detail, the
main features of the ideal
Homeric landscape. It is not so
very different from a great
garden of the present day, such
as the writer has often seen in
the Niagara peninsula in Canada.
The vegetables, among which
there are plenty of onions,
flourish in "orderly square
beds" between long rows of
vines, hanging heavy with
clusters of grapes; two
fountains run through the
garden, and there is an
abundance of pear, apple, and
fig trees. Foliage and meadow
and running water, with their
wood and corn and drink,
flatness, fertility, order-these
are all summed up in the
description of the Cyclops'
country, to the wandering Greek
a perfect land.
They have soft,
marshy meadows near the sea, and
good, rich, crumbling,
plowing-land, giving fine deep
crops, and vines always giving
fruit; a port so quiet that they
have no need of cables in it;
and at the head of the port, a
beautiful clear spring just
under a cave, and aspen poplars
all around it.3
The Greeks
disliked rocks and mountains,
although to the modern eye it is
the mountain scenery which is
most attractive. To Homer, and
to the practical men of his
time, the rough country was
distasteful. Pallas apologizes
to Ulysses for the roughness of
his native land; but she does
not fail to portray its good
points, and in her speech both
the objectionable and ideal
aspects of the landscape are
summed up with masterly
directness and common-sense. She
says:
This Ithaca of ours is,
indeed, a rough country enough
and not good for driving in;
but still, things might be
worse: it has plenty of corn,
and good wine, and always rain,
and soft, nourishing dew; and it
has good feeding for goats and
oxen, and all manner of wood,
and springs fit to drink at all
the year around.4
But what was
the Psalmist's ideal landscape?
With Homer, as we have seen, it
was rich meadow-land or a piece
of well-tilled ground. Fertility and
order are likewise
characteristics of the
Psalmist's ideal. The Greeks had
a horror of the mountains; in
this respect alone is their
ideal of landscape different
from that of Hebrew poetry. The
Psalmist, however, in looking up
to the mountains admires them
not for their picturesque or
sublime effects, but because he
sees on their fertile slopes the
cattle feeding on the rich
pasturage.5 "He maketh the grass
to grow upon the mountains," is
an ascription of praise to God;
but this verse was not suggested
by the beauty of those modest
spears of green, as Ruskin would
have us believe in the prose
poem which he founds upon these
quiet words; the Psalmist poet
simply looked upon the grass as
food for cattle; he looked with
the practical eye of the farmer
on the abundance of the pasture
on the mountains. The context
effectually disposes of any
poetic interpretation of this
verse, and shows the
matter-of-fact thought of the
Psalmist:.
Sing to Jehovah a
song of thanksgiving,
The
picture of messianic peace and
plenty in Ps. 72 is reflected in
minor glimpses of agricultural
landscape. Ps. 65 is a festal
song. It recites the goodness of
God in watering the land with
the autumn rains, and contains a
prayer for more rain, probably
the later rain of March and
April which is needed to mature
the crop.
Thou hast visited the
land and watered it;
In this homely piece of
landscape the poet has the eye
of a Flemish painter; he
delights to fill his landscape
with fat beeves and sheep
reposing quietly on the green
meadows. His fancy takes flight
for a moment with the mention of
"the river of God"—an allusion
to the mythical stream in the
house of the skies which is
discharged in rain at God's
command. But the poet continues
in the next line with good
common-sense to mark the thirsty
furrows and the hard clods, and,
farmer-like, he sees the
necessity for more rain, and
prays for it accordingly. His
prayer is answered, and he is so
overjoyed at the prospect of a
full granary that he rises into
the realm of the beautiful and
the imaginative. He sings a song
of a fair valley, ripe unto the
harvest—a broad sweep of yellow
cornfields, lying between
rolling hills; and hills and
meadows sing for joy. This is
one of the rare instances in
Hebrew poetry where the singer
transfers his emotions to
natural objects and makes them
join man in acclamation to God.6
If we would see more of farming
life or of agricultural
landscape as the Psalmist saw
it, we must rely upon slight
sketches and few, written by
chance as it were. The color is
faint, and only broad and
hurried lines are used; but the
smell of the soil, of the rich,
brown earth, is here in enduring
freshness after the passage of
ages. What an immortal epitome
of the farmer's toil, year after
year in every century the same,
is this exquisite strophe of Ps.
126:
Turn Thou, O Jehovah, our
captivity,
Ps. 129 contains two
pictures suggested by sowing and
reaping. First the poet exclaims
against the wicked:
Ploughers
have ploughed on my back,
Then the poet imagines what
shall be their harvest, and he
draws a little cameo of the
well-known scene in early spring
on the roof-tops of Palestine,
where a crop of bright-green
grass nourished by the
rains withers
and falls dead before the hot
sun. The psalm is also
interesting as it contains the
ancient Israelitish salutation
to reapers, the customary answer
to which may be found in Ruth
2:4. But here is the Psalmist's
simple picture of ephemeral
growth:
It happens to them as to
grass on the roofs,
Another sinister simile
furnished by agriculture occurs
in Ps. 141:7:
Just as when a
man ploughs and harrows the
earth,
To the
majority of readers, however,
the most beautiful piece of
landscape-painting in the
Psalter is Ps. 23. No two
delusions are more popular than
to suppose that David wrote all
the psalms, and that the
background for the Psalms as a
whole might well be the pastoral
scene of the twenty-third psalm.
Few readers of the Psalter
imagine that the poets who
composed these lyrics were
toilers in the busy towns of
Palestine, or those who sat in
exile beneath the shadow of
Babylonian palaces, or simple
farmers trimming their vines and
planting their corn in the Judea
of the Maccabean period. The
entrancing loveliness of the
twenty-third psalm, the sweet
idyl of shepherd life, has cast
all other nature-description of
the Psalter into comparative
obscurity, and we are apt to
regard Palestine of old as a
land of shepherds and pleasant
valleys and winding streams.
But, while there have always
been and are today shepherds in
the Holy Land tending their
flocks on the hillsides, the
agricultural scenes in the
Psalter are more thoroughly
representative of the landscape
of the country and come nearer
to the common ideal of the
practical Jew. The twenty-third
psalm, however, is the ideal
landscape of the smaller
shepherd class, and carries with
it such an atmosphere of perfect
peace and rest that it stands as
our ideal of Bible landscape.
The poem is wonderfully simple,
and, although it is graphic, the
effects are obtained by terse,
quick sketching—a movement which
brings a new image with every
line. The divine Shepherd, the pastures of young
grass, the quiet waters, the
sure paths, the gloomy ravine,
the defending club and guiding
staff, and finally the scene of
rude hospitality under the black
tent—these pictures come up one
after the other in rapid
succession, and are drawn almost
with unpremeditated art. The
attempts of modern commentators
to fill in the foreground and
background of this simple
landscape serve to show the
difference between the present
genius for detail and the
ancient disregard for delicate
tints and fanciful touches. The
Psalmist finds nothing in the
landscape which would puzzle the unpoetical sightseer; he sees
green grass and water and a dark
ravine; there are food and rest,
a kind shepherd, a table at
which the stranger finds
refreshment and shelter from the
avenger. If we would gratify our
curiosity as to fine effects and
obtain a closer view of the
scene, we must seek information
from the brush of a modem
painter who has visited
Palestine, and who can supply us
with an abundance of what we
term in our modern phrase "local
color." The Psalmist, in his
sublime indifference to detail,
left a problem for his
unexpected millions of readers
in his brief allusion to the
table prepared in the midst of
enemies. At last Professor
George Adam Smith7 has offered
what seems to be a very
satisfactory explanation. The
whole poem, he declares, instead
of the first half alone, as many
commentators have supposed,
reflects pastoral life. The last
two stanzas take us into the
shepherd's brown-black tent,
where his table is set and where
he dispenses "the golden piety
of the wilderness" to "the guest
of God," the man who has shed
blood and who is fleeing across
the desert wilds with the
avenger hot upon his track. By
the ancient usage, so remarkable
in a rude age, a man was bound
to receive the guilty fugitive
as a guest, and care for him and
protect him from his pursuers
during a certain length of time,
usually three days. Here is a
description of the landscape
from the modern writer:
The
landscape is nearly all glare,
monotonous levels or low ranges
of hillocks, with as little
character upon them as the waves
of the sea, shimmering with
mirage under a cloudless heaven.
The bewildering monotony is
broken by only two exceptions.
Here and there the ground will
be cleft by a deep ravine, which
gapes in black contrast to the
glare, and by its sudden
darkness blinds the men and sheep
that enter it to the beasts of
prey that have their lairs in
its recesses. But there are also
hollows as gentle and lovely as
the ravines are terrible, where
water bubbles up and runs
quietly between grassy banks
under the open shade of trees.
It is strange that a Psalmist
poet should have drawn an
illustration from pastoral
landscape to describe the
descent to death, but a scene in
Ps. 49 shows the wicked being
led by their shepherd, Death,
down into Sheol, and being
folded there in that dreary,
shadowy, underground city,
where they are gathered with
their fathers and never behold
the glad light of day any more:
Like sheep unresisting they are
thrust down into Sheol,
The
objectionable aspects of
Palestinian landscape are
frequently described in the
Psalter, although not with any
great fulness. The first psalm
not only depicts the ideal man,
but also shows the fate of the
wicked by a reference to nature.
The wicked man, according to the
philosophy of the Psalmist,
shall come to nought, as the
chaff which the wind driveth
away, the reference here being
to the threshing-floor which
was situated on a hill where the
wind could get a clear sweep at
the chaff. The wicked man
perishes because God takes no
notice of him, and he fades away
like a false road, a misleading track, in the
illimitable desert sands. The
opposite of cheerfulness and
usefulness is that which is
unfruitful or desert land. Two
dangers confronted the farmer:
failure of the crops owing to
drought, and the ravages of the
tempest and the burning fiery
wind. The shepherd disliked the
rocky gorges and deep ravines
where the wild beasts lurked in
the covert and the footing was
insecure. The pilgrim or
merchant dreaded the wide
expanse of desert. The exile in
Babylon had a highlander's
aversion for the flats of the
land between the rivers, and
sighed for the hills of home. In
the Psalter, therefore, if we do
not find any set descriptions of
the parched land, the waste
places, the desert, or the
Babylonian lowland, there are
numerous allusions which vent
these dislikes.
The aversion of
the Psalmist poets to the
sun-parched landscape, and to
the waste place where loneliness
and gloom keep company, even to the loneliness often
felt in a crowd, when one is
like "the solitary bird on the
roof," is nowhere more forcibly
expressed than in Ps. 102,
supposed to have been written by
a fugitive in the wilderness:
For my days vanish like smoke,
A second class of landscape
metaphors is suggested by
pastoral life. The shepherd
longs for good mountain paths,
for sure footing; he slips into
bogs and miry places, he hates
the dark ravines. You see him on
the edge of a precipice: "If my
foot slip, they will triumph.
For I stand on the verge of
falling" (Ps. 38:I6, I7); "Thou
hast saved my life from death,
yea, my foot from falling" (Ps.
56:I3); "Well-nigh were my feet
gone from under me, there was
nothing to keep my steps from
slipping" (Ps. 73:2). In the
same psalm the fate of the
wicked is described:
It is but
on slippery ground that thou settest them,
The
ever-recurring reference to God
as "a strong rock" is the commonest metaphor derived from
pastoral life.
A very vague
description of the desert is
contained in Ps. 107:
They who
wandered in the wilderness, in
the pathless desert,
The chief
horror in the desert landscape
is its tracklessness; it is the
danger of going astray and being
lost in the dreary sea of sand
that impresses the poet most.
The monotony of the scenery does
not seem to tire his eye, nor do
the picturesque elements of
desert landscape attract his
gaze. He has no eye for
brilliant sunsets, or for the
sirocco sweeping the
desert-floor like a red besom of
destruction; he has no
word-picture of the oasis, the
diamond of the desert, nor yet
for the ghastly skeletons of men
and camels that line the route
of the caravan. Every eastern
traveler has described all these
aspects of the desert landscape
with painful insistence, but no
Psalmist poet has sketched such
scenes as he saw them. In his
practical way he uses general
terms and comprehensive figures.
The following passage (Ps.
107:33-43) is in his best
utilitarian style, and sums up
the difference, as he saw it,
between an ideal and an ugly
landscape:
He turns streams into
desert, |
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1) Modern Painters (1860), Vol. III, pp. 184 ff. 2) Iliad, ii, 776. 3) Odyssey, ix, 132 ff. 4) Ibid., xiii, 236 ff. 5) Ps. 50:10. 6) See Pss. 96:11, 12; 98:7, 8. 7) See article on " The Twenty-Third Psalm," by G. A. Smith, Expositor, 1895, p. 38. 213
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